Cambodia Sews the World's T-Shirts. Brunei Bans the Office Christmas Party. Guess Which One Has More Female Managers.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · 🇧🇳 Brunei

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Consider two facts that refuse to sit quietly next to each other. In Cambodia, women make up roughly 85 percent of the garment workforce that keeps the country's economy running, yet almost none of them run the unions that negotiate on their behalf. In Brunei, a conservative Islamic monarchy where alcohol is illegal and Friday is the sabbath, women hold 37 percent of private-sector management jobs — the highest share anywhere in Southeast Asia. The lesson, before you've even booked a flight, is that "gender-progressive workplace" and "gender-progressive country" are not the same purchase, and the brochure will not tell you which one you're buying.

Do's & Don'ts

🇰🇭 Cambodia

🇧🇳 Brunei

Cambodia

Cambodia's headline numbers look almost egalitarian. Female labor force participation reached 65.9 percent in 2025 against 77.7 percent for men, and the overall workforce participation rate climbed to 71.6 percent, according to World Bank and ILO-modeled estimates. The Global Gender Gap Index has at times scored Cambodia's female-to-male labor force ratio at 0.93 — high by regional standards. But participation is not the same as position. More women than men in Cambodia are self-employed or working without wages for family enterprises, a pattern ILO data flags as informal-sector concentration rather than economic parity.

Nowhere is the gap between presence and power starker than in garments, the country's signature export industry. Roughly 85 percent of the sector's workforce is female, per Better Work and ILO reporting, yet leadership — both on factory floors and inside the unions meant to represent workers — skews male. Human Rights Watch's 2015 investigation "Work Faster or Get Out" documented pregnancy-related discrimination, including reduced-hours workers being quietly pushed out for working "too slowly," and the practice persists in updated reporting from Better Work's ongoing gender program. Cultural residue plays a role too: Cambodia's Ministry of Women's Affairs has linked workplace deference norms to Chbab Srey, a traditional code of conduct instructing women toward modesty and submissiveness that remained on the primary school curriculum until 2007.

Brunei

Brunei inverts the puzzle. Female labor force participation actually peaked at 57.72 percent in 2018 and has been sliding since, per World Bank and CEIC data — the opposite trajectory from Cambodia's. Yet within the labor market that remains, women have quietly out-climbed their regional peers: 56 percent of the public-sector workforce is female, and the share of women in senior civil service grades rose from 61 percent in 2015 to 65 percent in 2022, according to Brunei's national report to the Beijing Platform for Action. In the private sector, 37 percent of managerial roles belong to women — again, tops in Southeast Asia.

The catch sits one level up. Only an estimated 9 to 12 percent of Brunei's lawmakers are women, giving the country the lowest political representation of women in ASEAN even as it leads the region in management. The Global Gender Gap Report 2024 ranked Brunei 105th of 146 countries overall, a reminder that management-suite parity coexists with a persistent private-sector pay gap and a legal-cultural framework — hijab norms, alcohol prohibition, Friday as sabbath — that shapes how gender is performed at work far more explicitly than in Cambodia's more improvisational hierarchy.

The Reckoning

Put the two side by side and the received wisdom about "conservative" versus "developing" economies collapses. Cambodia, poorer and less regulated, produces a workforce that is majority-female on the ground and minority-female in the boardroom. Brunei, wealthier and governed by a stricter form of Islam than almost anywhere else in the region, produces the opposite: fewer working women overall, but disproportionate access to management once they're in. Hofstede Insights' framework — which scores Cambodia as strongly hierarchical on Power Distance, consistent with its top-down, face-preserving management style — doesn't even carry full data for Brunei, a small gap in Western cultural-metrics literature that mirrors how little outside attention the country's internal gender arrangement gets.

The counterintuitive takeaway for anyone relocating: dress-code anxiety is the wrong thing to worry about in Brunei, where the rules are explicit and stable, and the right thing to worry about in Cambodia, where the rules are unwritten, relational, and enforced through face rather than policy. A woman moving into Brunei corporate life can expect a clearer, if narrower, lane to management. A woman moving into Cambodian corporate life can expect a much bigger workforce of women around her — and a much murkier path past them into leadership.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Answering a thread on foreigners in Cambodia, one long-term resident described living there with her wife from 1993 to 2017, saying real acceptance came only after years of building genuine local relationships rather than from any short-term goodwill extended to newcomers.

Expat.com — The Phnom Penh work-culture guide notes that in Cambodian-owned businesses, formal dress is expected and it isn't uncommon for employees to bow to bosses and higher-ups, a hierarchy that sits awkwardly next to the far more casual norms at foreign-run NGOs and startups down the street.

Quora — In a thread on daily life in Brunei, one respondent summarized the unspoken bargain as straightforward: as a non-Muslim, there are no real complications at work or otherwise, provided you visibly respect the prevailing religion and culture at all times.

Adventurous Kate (expat travel blog) — The writer recounts an expat who was deported after dressing as the Sultan for Halloween, using it to illustrate how personal conduct outside the office — not just inside it — can end a foreign worker's entire stay in Brunei without warning.

Expat.com forum — Contributors discussing Phnom Penh business etiquette flagged that instructions given to Khmer staff are often met with a smile and nod even when not understood, since admitting confusion risks "losing face" — a dynamic that manager and managed alike, regardless of gender, must learn to navigate carefully.

Conclusion

Neither country hands a relocating professional a finished answer on gender equity; both hand her a specific, legible trade-off. Cambodia offers volume — a workforce where women are everywhere — without yet offering a reliable ladder, and the informality that makes daily office life relaxed is the same informality that makes harassment and pregnancy discrimination harder to formally escalate. Brunei offers a narrower, more codified path where the rules are known in advance, management doors are unusually open for the region, and the tradeoff is a legal-cultural framework that limits what "the office" even encompasses, from dress to alcohol to who gets to legislate about it later. Choose based on which kind of constraint you'd rather manage: the one that's everywhere but unwritten, or the one that's narrower but at least tells you where it starts.